I'm about to release a project of mine that I'm really proud of under the GNU GPL and I have some questions:

Should one attach a copyright notice on each and every source code file from their project? I think it's a bit ridiculous to claim copyright on a 3 line abstract class. Should I attach a copyright notice only to really important source code files?

Can I not attach the whole standard thingy? Because it's big and bulky and gets in the way... If so, is the variant below ok/enough?

Copyright year firstname lastname.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation.

1 Answer
1

Near the beginning of every file there should be a copyright notice and the following statement (change Foobar to your program's name):

This file is part of Foobar.
Foobar is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Foobar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Foobar. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

You should also include a copy of the full license text somewhere in the distribution of your program.